ABLETONE SUITE 8

A while back after a friend saw how much money I spent col­lect­ing gui­tar ped­als, syn­the­siz­ers, drum machines, sam­plers ‚mix­ers and var­i­ous effect units try­ing to achieve my ulti­mate sound in a live scae­nario and in my home stu­dio, he shook his head and laughed. He is a Dj and I am a singer in a band. He catches pub­lic trans­port to a gig car­ry­ing a com­puter in his back pack, and I lug a case full of gad­gets in a car boot, he can make music in the kitchen, on the toi­let and I bed, I must walk out in the cold to my garage stu­dio. His entire show, although a dif­fer­ent genre to mine is bass, big bass with insane cuts, sam­ples and seam­less mixes of hip hop tracks with clas­sic tunes and quirky beats. He fin­ishes a set, unplugs his line out cable and sits back to enjoy his rider. What a jerk! I can see what is on his com­puter screen, an intri­cate colour­ful grid of songs and sam­ples laid out in per­fect log­i­cal order all at his fin­ger tips.

This was my first look at Able­ton Live! I liked what I saw but was puz­zled as to how this could work for me in a live band sit­u­a­tion. Well when in doubt; You Tube! Every kid and a video cam­era knew how to con­trol Able­ton Live and knew it’s capa­bil­i­ties, I needed to also! I quickly came to realise Able­ton is not just for DJ’s, they had been hid­ing it from me for too long! Fast for­ward a cou­ple of years and the many gad­gets I once carted around town have now been traded in for a com­puter. Able­ton Live is capa­ble of cre­at­ing any sound I can pos­si­bly imag­ine. No longer do I need ped­als for vocal effects that take up half the stage and gen­er­ally become an engineer’s night­mare. It is truly remark­able the many ways in which dif­fer­ent peo­ple use Able­ton to cre­ate and con­trol any genre of music imag­in­able. You soon will realise using Able­ton Live is like musi­cal Lego, and it is by far the most diverse tool for mak­ing music avail­able, be it for record­ing, song writ­ing, com­pos­ing, pro­duc­tion, remix­ing or for live per­for­mance. May I con­tinue?
Eight is great

Well Kids, Able­ton has Released Able­ton Live 8 and Able­ton Suite 8 the lat­est and great­est to date. I now have just con­verted my com­puter into the ulti­mate musi­cal instru­ment by installing Able­ton Suite 8 and it still remains one of the most user friendly soft­ware your likely to encounter. If you find your­self stuck on how to use any of the seem­ingly lim­it­less func­tions Live has intu­itive help win­dows and tuto­ri­als neatly tucked in the cor­ners of the screen ded­i­cated to steer­ing you in the right direc­tion at any time. Sim­ply by hov­er­ing the mouse over any task you’re never far from an answer on how to con­trol any part of the pro­gram. So let’s go, Live’s non­lin­ear, intu­itive flow, com­bined with pow­er­ful real-time edit­ing and flex­i­ble per­for­mance options make it an essen­tial tool that can turn any home set up into a full func­tion­ing stu­dio. It’s a full multi track record­ing sys­tem with the abil­ity to record up to 32-bit/192 kHz. Within the realms of record­ing soft­ware Live has it nailed, plug a firewire mixer between Able­ton and your com­puter and you can set up your own full multi track record­ing suite or run a sound card with the usual inputs and out­puts. You can drag in an end­less array of fil­ters, lim­iters, com­pres­sors and effects and your much loved instru­ment of choice or mic doesn’t sound so bad with the help of Able­ton 8.

BRING ON THE NEW FEATURES

The new Live 8 includes five pre­vi­ously unre­leased effects: Vocoder, with a neat way of draw­ing your way around that sweet robot sound (Lau­rie Ander­son; eat your heart out) Multi­band Dynam­ics, equipped with new visu­als to help you under­stand what’s actu­ally hap­pen­ing with the three fre­quency bands of com­pres­sion. A clas­sic stomp box like Over­drive, a “brick wall” Lim­iter to smack your peaks back down, and a cool freaky Fre­quency Shifter with flange and ring mod­u­la­tor, all orga­nized in a library that is sim­ple to locate and nav­i­gate through. Lev­els and effects are eas­ily con­trolled and visu­ally vibrant. One of the many addi­tions to Live 8 is the screen zoom found in the pref­er­ences menu which enables you to zoom from 50% to 200% allow­ing dif­fer­ent size views for vary­ing screen res­o­lu­tions. It’s very cool mak­ing it look big and handy after many hours in front of a monitor!

Group level con­trol is a new and long awaited fea­ture which works like a sep­a­rate mix buss, allow­ing mul­ti­ple simul­ta­ne­ous level adjust­ment or multi-parameter manip­u­la­tion. What this means is you can change and tweak a whole bunch of lev­els at once! Now you have the abil­ity to do this with Live 8 you will won­der how you ever lived with­out it. Another new fea­ture is edit­ing with unlim­ited “undo’s” mak­ing record­ing work pain­less and risk free. The new cross fader func­tion has also been included to the Arrange­ment View for real-time, non-destructive fades.

Ok so I can record my band, great. But what if my band and I decide we need to expand our musi­cal hori­zons? Let’s delve into the banks of what Live 8 the full suite edi­tion has and explore how you can use it to alien­ate your­self from the uncre­ative. The new Suite 8 library fea­tur­ing over 1600 expres­sive sounds, 107 instru­ments each rang­ing 20 veloc­ity lay­ers and up to 4 alter­nat­ing hits per instru­ment is big­ger and chunkier than ever, blank CD’s and end­less amounts of free time seem to be the only things not sup­plied in the mega 48 GB soft­ware bun­dle, a whole new world awaits you my friends, so let’s make some tunes.

Instal­la­tion is can take a bit of time but that because there is 45GB over four disks which is a lot of info. Straight after instil­la­tion the kids who are famil­iar with pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Able­ton Live are going to notice new inclu­sions, let’s start with the new Oper­a­tor, in sim­ple terms, it’s a library of FM syn­the­siz­ers, but this time it’s on steroids and have an army of equally pumped friends. New lad­der modes with 14 fil­ter types, re designed fre­quency response curve view and inte­grated wave­shaper in the fil­ter, let­ting you adjust the amount of drive and shape. The fil­ter, LFO, and pitch envelopes are all totally adjustable and MIDI mod­u­la­tion is con­troled like never before with set­tings for five MIDI con­trol sources. Alright I said it MIDI, I smell worms in can form, did some­one just open it? Now as always, Able­ton is and always will be all of your MIDI dreams come true ( sorry Rob, I don’t know how 12 scored this review-Ed), as mas­ter, slave with full ReWire sup­port, easy com­puter sync, run firewire mix­ers, con­trollers, key­boards, drum pads and also for mul­ti­core or mul­ti­proces­sor sys­tems. Basi­cally any MIDI con­troller hard­ware can be assigned to con­trol almost every fea­ture, and assign­ing cus­tom MIDI con­trols is as sim­ple as click­ing the MIDI but­ton then mov­ing, slid­ing or push­ing your con­troller and Bam! Done! Also added to help out is an improved Plug-in para­me­ters con­fig­ure but­ton, a new tool for plug-ins with mul­ti­ple para­me­ters. New Live 8 comes with Sim­ple MIDI map­ping plus instant map­ping for selected listed hard­ware (check out the Akai Pro­fes­sional APC40 a new Akai and Able­ton designed Live con­troller) but for sim­ple sweet map­ping, stick a MIDI hub in your com­puter and hook up a cou­ple of key­boards and.. see you later world, hello, instant stu­dio her­mit. Live 8 sup­ports AIFF, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vor­bis and FLAC files, VST and AU effects and instru­ments. Also Live can work run­ning along­side other pro­grams like Pro Tools, Logic, Rea­son or Cubase . The whole MIDI sequenc­ing has had an over­haul in this lat­est Live ver­sion. The MIDI edi­tor now fea­tures step record­ing with easy to fol­low labels and a new insert marker and numer­ous edit­ing improvements.

ASK AND YOU SHALL RECORD

I’m a singer, I can’t play drums, but I have already bought fin­ger­less gloves and a set of sweat bands!

“Able­ton Live 8 can you help me?”
“Sure, would you like Latin Per­cus­sion, Ses­sion Drums or do you pre­fer Drum Machine Clas­sics?”
“Um yes… all of them please!”

The prob­lem you will face is choos­ing your kit. The selec­tion of band mem­ber replace­ment is almost ridicu­lous. The Latin Per­cus­sion con­tains Kits and instru­ments all con­fig­ured as Drum Racks, mak­ing it easy to choose your style from a col­lec­tion of acoustic per­cus­sion instru­ments from Brazil, Afro-Cuban and African music. If you some­how can’t quite fig­ure out how to shake your mara­cas, beat your con­gas, smack your bon­gos, tim­bales, claves, shak­ers, tam­bourines or chime your bells to the style you wished you could, don’t throw away your dreams of Car­ni­val, just sim­ply drag and drop one of the many clips and grooves that are included to add some Latin feel to your pat­terns.

But if you like the sound of the drum kit that only stu­dio record­ing can cap­ture, pre­pare thy selves for Ses­sion Drums, the mother lode: 28 GB of drums sam­pled at 24-bit, per­fect repli­ca­tion and manip­u­la­tion of a huge bank of sounds each recorded with dif­fer­ent stu­dio micro­phones, close, over­head and room posi­tion­ing. These are big sound­ing real Kicks with options of dif­fer­ent felt, wood or plas­tic beat­ers. Snares with punch, Hi-Hats with bite, Ride cym­bals, Toms all designed for true stu­dio real­ism. The sounds of each drum and micro­phone uses a sep­a­rate chan­nel for mix­ing, and yes, in “your stu­dio” you can always have more cow­bell. Drag in or hot swap pre­sets for each drum and choose your sounds from kits like clas­sic rock to funk, soul and coun­try. Each hit on your kit feels true to life, be it with brushes, sticks or mal­lets they are fully ver­sa­tile from the drum strik­ing area to veloc­ity and tun­ing. As part of Able­ton Live 8’s new CPU man­age­ment sys­tem, the sam­ples and kits are easy to nav­i­gate through­out your library, and will load up quickly using only what is needed.

The Hip Hop and DJ world can either rejoice or fear in the new work­flow improve­ments. Your aver­age Joe can eas­ily become DJ Joe. It has now become eas­ier on the late night brain to manip­u­late audio, like Mp3’s and other audio sam­ples Lives’ Elas­tic Audio engine has been added, the new warp­ing engine and real-time time-stretching has sim­pli­fied the pre­vi­ous warp func­tion, now audio events can be mod­i­fied by adjust­ing the events them­selves on the time­line and you can now slice audio files to MIDI tracks These changes have made it gen­er­ally eas­ier to fathom the remix world if you have never been down that path. Throw in clas­sic drum machine sounds like the 606 or 808 and soon you may con­tem­plate your musi­cal future. It’s true noth­ing sounds quite like an 808. Also sam­ples of song tem­plates with pre-configured tracks and rout­ing are included, 50 clips of pat­terns and phrases and demos, a good tool to see how it all works.

The lat­est Live 8 pack­age will blow your mind with con­tent and pos­si­bil­i­ties, the Essen­tial Instru­ment Col­lec­tion Ver­sion 2, 15GB of a world of instru­ments rang­ing from Acoustic Key­boards, Elec­tric Key­boards, Orches­tral Strings, Orches­tral Brass, Orches­tral Wood­winds, Gui­tars and Plucked Instru­ments, Mal­lets and Choirs. Each of these instru­ments are cap­tured in a vari­ety of veloc­i­ties and artic­u­la­tions, also this exten­sive library uses CPU con­ser­va­tion. These instru­ments sound amaz­ing and are as flex­i­ble and ver­sa­tile as the real thing, again turn on your MIDI key­board, load up the Stra­to­caster from the library, choose your plec­trum and there goes one more band member.

The new tech­niques and improve­ments to pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Able­ton are scat­tered through­out the pro­gram, the sec­ond view; the Ses­sion View (A grid that can hold a record­ing, MIDI file, or any other musi­cal idea used to orga­nize and trig­ger sets of sounds called clips, arranged into scenes that can be trig­gered) has also had some new added gold, like a way of hid­ing or min­i­miz­ing the clips to save room on your screen and new track group­ing.
Live 8’s new “groove engine” has improved your abil­ity to sim­ply drag and drop MPC style grooves. You can now add swing or the quan­tize to any per­for­mance in your arrange­ment in real time, or per­haps cre­ate your own groove by extract­ing from any audio or midi and then apply your new grooves the same way as the stan­dard library files. If you like what you do save them for use in another project.

A brand new instru­ment cre­ated for your tool­box in the new 8 is Col­li­sion, a stun­ningly real­is­tic mal­let and per­cus­sion sound synth with sounds includ­ing xylo­phone, glock­en­spiel, marimba, vibra­phone and tom’s. Cycling ’74 and Zero-G are loops and sam­ples thrown in to the mix to mess around with. Now as big as this pack­age is your going to find more fea­tures than men­tioned, but all the more rea­son you should find out for your­self by get­ting your hands on Able­ton Suite8. Whichever Live you choose to go with of the three dif­fer­ent ver­sions Live LE 8, Live 8 and Able­ton Suite 8 you will not be dis­ap­pointed, the only regret you will have is that you need to sleep some­time, and your pil­low has not got MIDI. The pro­gram can be down­loaded from the Able­ton site as a full func­tion­ing ver­sion minus the abil­ity to save or export. Test it out, and count your band mem­bers, do they still make the cut? My final thought lies with my friend the DJ, all I can say is who’s laugh­ing now!

By Jethro Fox
Dis­trib­uted by Music Link